J. F. Art.
Why do they call it science a collaborative exercise if all people ever publish is successes? Very rarely in the literature do you find articles on artefacts or, *gasp*, failures. Unless of course you study the artefact/failure to bits and then maybe some obscure journal somewhere may publish it.
Even many of the successes that get published probably have some degree of artefactuality in them anyway. The big names can publish without much fear of reprisal because they’re so revered in the field. So many people worship these researchers and go with the flow that the O’ revered ones can probably get away with saying ludicrous things like plants actually dance around at night when no-one is watching.
I think general scientific collaboration would be greatly improved if people talked about failures. Since 90% of molecular biology experiments are failures, there will be plenty to publish. This way, not only can honours students actually publish stuff, but scientists can learn from others’ mistakes so that the same bleeding mistake doesn’t have to be repeated in hundreds of labs across the world, wasting everyone’s time and money.
I say set up the Journal of Failures and Artefacts (abbreviated to J. F. Art. for obvious toilet humour reasons) and let the papers roll in. Let’s learn from the mistakes of others - who knows, perhaps we’d have a cure for cancer and AIDS already if people actually published failures.